Stepping into their shoes: "Breakthrough Shoes" at Bezalel

• Published date: 29 March 2024
• Author: WALLA!
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The exhibition features 19 designers, all graduates of the jewelry and fashion department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem

Among the unique designs, you can find hand shoes for acrobats and circus performers alongside shoes that tell of a dream to fly after a serious injury and shoes that are a challenge to the familiar sneakers.

Alongside the useful function of shoes there are messages of freedom, softness, freedom of movement but also messages of restriction and confinement (shoes as a sign of submission and devotion). In their works, the creators try to respond to freedom, movement, restriction. The exhibition features shoes that reflect the planning, design and creation processes of students from the past six years, as part of the studies in the jewelry and fashion department at Bezalel.

The shoes are surprising and present different perspectives on man, his life, his culture and his world. Their creation is based on a traditional body of knowledge, combined with one-off inventions, which were developed for the first time as a result of the need to design and touch the material. The design process tells a story through useful and wearable shoes, loaded with new meanings, which have the power to offer and create a different reality - a new user experience. The items presented in the exhibition move in the space between the wild and the civilized, between the personal and the public, between the local and the global, between the contemporary and the future. They express preoccupation with a variety of issues such as: gender and cultural identity, ecology, sustainability...